Communication Methods for CR&S Engagement

A CR&S practitioner can manage relationships and drive engagement by choosing the right form of communication for each situation. There are three broad forms, each with distinct strengths, and the practitioner’s skill is to tailor them to the audience, the message, and the circumstances.

Verbal communication: face-to-face, by video or by phone, is the richest form. It allows immediate feedback, conveys tone and body language, and lets a message be adjusted in real time as the other person reacts. This makes it the strongest form for building relationships, exploring stakeholders’ interests, handling sensitive or contentious issues, and influencing people, because trust and persuasion depend on the human cues that only richer forms such as face-to-face carry.

Written communication: reports, proposals, emails as records, partnership agreements, are leaner but precise and durable. They work best when setting out detail accurately, confirming what has been agreed, and creating an accountable record that stakeholders can refer back to.

Electronic communication: email, messaging, intranets, social media, shared platforms, are fast, scalable, and ideal for reaching many people, coordinating across distance, and sharing routine updates, though they carry the highest risk of being misread when a message is sensitive or complex.

The most useful framework for choosing between these communication methods is Media Richness Theory, developed through early work by Daft and Lengel (1983) and formalised in their later article (Daft and Lengel, 1986). It ranks communication channels by their ‘richness,’ their capacity to carry information measured by 4 things:

• The immediacy of feedback,
• The number of cues (tone, expression, body language),
• The degree of personalisation,
• The variety of language possible.

By these measures, face-to-face is the richest channel, followed by video, then phone, with written and electronic forms the leanest. The theory’s central rule is to match the richness of the channel to the complexity of the message. Rich channels suit ambiguous, sensitive, or high-stakes messages, where misunderstanding is likely and immediate clarification matters (Daft and Lengel, 1986). A difficult conversation with a community group or persuading a sceptical leadership team is an example of this. Lean channels suit clear, routine, factual messages, where richness would simply be inefficient, such as a scheduling email or a regular progress update. Sending a sensitive message through a lean channel, such as breaking difficult news by email, is a classic and damaging mismatch.

Tailoring communication therefore drives engagement in two connected ways. First, it manages and influences relationships: choosing a rich, personal channel for an important stakeholder signals that the relationship matters and builds the trust on which influence depends, while defaulting to email for everything weakens relationships over time. Second, it improves the message itself: the right channel ensures the message is understood as intended, neither lost in detail nor stripped of the human meaning that motivates people to act. A practitioner who understands their audience can go further still, tailoring not just the channel but the language, framing, and level of technical detail to each group. For example, they might speak in simple or plain language to a general audience, precisely to a technical one, and in terms of shared values when seeking to engage and motivate. Research on CSR-related web disclosures also suggests that richer presentation can shape trust and audience perceptions, reinforcing the importance of channel choice in sustainability communication (Cho et al., 2009).

In practice, the strongest CR&S engagement uses the three forms together, in a deliberate sequence. For example, a significant initiative might be launched in a face-to-face meeting to build understanding and answer questions, confirmed in a written summary that creates a clear record, and sustained through regular electronic updates that keep people informed.

Matching each form to its purpose turns communication into a tool for managing internal and external relationships and driving CR&S engagement. The Channel Expansion Theory extends these ideas by recognising that people’s experience with a channel changes how rich it feels (Carlson and Zmud, 1999); Signposted resources on that theory and on more recent discussions of how Media Richness Theory still applies in digital contexts (Ishii, Lyons and Carr, 2019) can be found below.